Thursday, October 1, 2009

It's been way to long

The title says it all.

IP Freely has been very busy for the last god knows how many months and has really neglected his blogging duties and slew of loyal followers.

In the meantime we have had some interesting law: the Advocate General's opinion on the Adwords cases in particular. IP Freely really isn't sure what he thinks about this particular one. Fine I don't see that Google are infringing anyone's trade marks after all there are many legitimate owners (or users) of the same mark, not to mention the stifling effect stopping Adwords would have on Google and thus technology as a whole. However the AG's opinion to me just doesn't read right he bangs on about the similarities with comparative advertising etc which simply are not relevant and dismisses the potential of protection under that defence that I can't think of the name of (the one that's like the hosting defence but not) which would appear to be most relevant. It is also a shame that he bottled the chance to also comment on whether the advertisers themselves were liable for trade mark infringement, although reading between the lines one would say that it seems likely.

IP Freely is particularly looking forward to the ECJ decision on the above and more importantly the ECJ (and I guess the AG's opinion) on the other Adwords references. As well as a p2p case actually making it to court and being properly defended so that some kind of precedent can be established.

One not so interesting area of law (that IP Freely is currently trying to master but doesn't know where to start) is the implementation of a further 550 sections of the Companies Act 2006.......... we should have just kept the old one!